How IBM's Watson will change cybersecurity

InfoWorld | Nov 3, 2016

IBM captured our imaginations when it unveiled Watson, the artificial intelligence computer capable of playing—and winning!—the Jeopardy! game show. Since then, Big Blue has been introducing Watson’s analytics and learning capabilities across various industries, including healthcare and information security. Cognitive security technology such as Watson for Cybersecurity can change how information security professionals can defend against attacks by helping them digest vast amounts of data. Cognitive security has the potential to reduce incident response times, optimize accuracy of alerts, and stay current with threat research. According to recent statistics from IBM Institute of Business Value, 40 percent of security professionals believe cognitive security will improve detection and incident response decision-making capabilities, and 37 percent believe cognitive security solutions will significantly improve incident response time. Another 36 percent of respondents think cognitive security will provide increased confidence to discriminate between innocuous events and true incidents. If security analysts were able to stay current on threats and increase accuracy of alerts, they could also reduce response time. These are high expectations for Watson for Cybersecurity, and IBM is working with eight different universities to feed up to 15,000 new documents into Watson every month, including threat intelligence reports, cybercrime strategies, threat databases and materials from its own X-Force research library. Jeb Linton, the chief security architect of IBM Watson and Professor Nasir Memon, professor of computer science and engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, talk about how machines learn, and what the future of cognitive security technology looks like.